It's a situation that many who dream of working in a theatre will know all too well: they have passion and dedication in spades, but what they really need is advice on how to get their foot in the door. Enter Theatrecraft.

TheatreCraft is an annual career fair held in central London giving 16-24 year olds the opportunity to engage with theatre professionals and explore the various backstage careers available in the industry.

In recent years, the event has been held at the Royal Opera House however, due to ongoing work as part of the Open Up project, this year’s event will be hosted by The Waldorf Hilton and nearby West End theatres and will run from 9.30am-4.30pm on Monday 14 November. The fair is free to attend.

Throughout the day attendees will be able to interact with people currently working in the industry, discuss their career opportunities, ask experts for advice and make valuable contacts.

There will also be a range of workshops led by creative industry professionals providing a first-hand insight into various backstage careers. Staff from the Royal Opera House will run workshops giving insights into the Scenic Art, Armoury, Learning and Participation and the Lighting Visualization departments.

Starting a career in the highly competitive theatre industry can be challenging but many young people find jobs after their experiences at TheatreCraft.

‘One of the reasons TheatreCraft proved so useful to me in securing my apprenticeship was because I was able to speak to people already working in technical theatre', says Alex Dillon-McQueen, a Technical Apprentice at the ROH. 'I also really enjoyed the workshops; you’re sat in a room full of people your own age and all of them are interested in the same particular element of theatre as you. It was really inspiring!’

‘A friend already working in theatre encouraged me to attend TheatreCraft, assuring me that it would be essential in finding my first job – I’m so glad I listened! While I was there I attended two workshops and put my name down on every jobs mailing list going. During my ‘Ask The Experts’ session I discussed my CV with a member of staff from the Royal Opera House who gave me some crucial tips on the best way to present my skills and experience. Subsequently, I applied for jobs through the contacts I made on the day which resulted in two interviews and my current job at SOLT.’

TheatreCraft was created by Theatre Royal Haymarket Masterclass Trust and is now run in partnership with Society of London Theatre, the Royal Opera House, Mousetrap Theatre Projects, and Creative and Cultural Skills.

Russian-born Andrej Uspenski joined The Royal Ballet as a dancer in 2002 and danced with the Company for more than ten years before an injury ended his stage career.

In the last few years, however, Uspenski has transitioned into a career as a photographer and has spent the last year as the official photographer for The Royal Ballet. To date he has published three books documenting life behind the scenes with the Company, as well as an array of online photography shared via both his own Dancer’s Diary Instagram account, and the Royal Opera House’s official channels.

At the end of this Season, he leaves the ROH. We caught up with him to find out what life is like as a photographer with one of the world’s top ballet companies:

How did you join The Royal Ballet?

I auditioned. It was always one of my dreams to work for a big company. In those days, you had to contact the theatres by writing a letter. You couldn’t just google it and find all the information.

After three years with the Royal Danish Ballet, I felt I needed to move forward as an artist. I was always drawn to The Royal Ballet — I loved the repertory and wanted to be part of it.

It was triggered by an injury. I had a stress fracture and with those you just have to sit. So I started taking pictures of my friends in daily class and rehearsal. I really enjoyed capturing the personalities of the dancers and documenting their everyday routine.

What do you want to capture in your photographs and for audiences to take from them?

Personality. I don’t like poses. No matter who it is I’m photographing — I want to adjust to the subject, instead of asking them to do something. It sounds strange, but when I see somebody dancing, I know who they are — dancers are naked on stage. It’s an inside knowledge from years of dancing myself.

I take inspiration from my subjects and the setting too. Different theatres have their own personality. Many of the spaces inside the Royal Opera House are quite new for example, but backstage areas at the Paris Opera are very old. Both have a history, but are unique.

Patience. You could spend a month in the studio taking pictures and then you take one picture and it’s a winner. It’s sort of like dancing – you prepare for six weeks for a role and then it’s over after an hour on stage.

As long as you have passion, you'll be good. If you really want to do something in life, you will do your best to get it.

What has been your highlight of photographing the Company this Season?

A couple of particular highlights this Season have been watching Matthew Ball and Yasmine Naghdi’s debuts in Romeo and Juliet, and seeingReece Clarke develop. Of course working with more established dancers is a fantastic privilege too and it's been amazing to photograph Natalia Osipova showing off her amazing acting skills in Straplessand the amazing self-assured performances of Steven McRae throughout the Season. Steven in particular makes me jealous as a former dancer – the way he tunes his body is fascinating and I wish I was able to do that!

Your Instagram account has a large following. What influence do you think social media has had on dance photography?

It’s had a great influence but, increasingly, photographs taken for social media are more about self-promotion. That’s good in a way in that it empowers the individual, but photographs do feel less like art. Then of course there’s the volume – with everyone taking selfies, every phone has thousands of images in them. It’s fantastic that there’s such an appetite for content, however, and I’m looking forward to continuing sharing dance photography via my account.

How will you remember your time with The Royal Ballet?

I’ve never seen so many talented people in one place! It’s amazing how much effort and talent goes into getting shows on stage and how everyone works together to further the ROH’s art forms. I’ll miss the Royal Opera House – it’s a remarkable place.

The film features glimpses into the rehearsal studio, as well as Lauren's insights into the life of a ballet dancer:

‘The adrenaline you experience is like nothing else, and the comedown from the adrenaline is also like nothing else. You need the pressure to get through it', she says. 'The life of a dancer is intense'.

Lauren will perform the challenging grand pas de deux, as well as the iconic Sugar Plum Fairy solo. Despite the exhausting choreography however, for Lauren, performing in The Nutcracker is ‘three hours of heaven’.

‘[Being on stage is] like having a completely different life. If you’re having a bad day, it’s the most cathartic place to be.’

The film also features Lauren reflecting on realizing her childhood dreams of becoming a ballerina, as well as looking to the future:

‘I’d really like to teach or to coach – to pass on what I’ve learnt. It’s what I know and the skills that I have. I don’t have a degree or a PhD – this is where I’ve put my life’s work’.

For the opening weekend of Deloitte Ignite on 5 and 6 September 2015, the Paul Hamlyn Hall will host 12 huge, vibrantly-coloured silk banners. They take their inspiration from the history of the Royal Opera House and are the work of award-winning, not-for-profit outdoor art company Kinetika and its founder, silk artist Ali Pretty.

The banners are made of Habotai silk and are each 11 metres long. They were painted using the Batik method, in which wax is used to block out sections of the silk before it is hand-dyed. The whole project took more than seven hundred and eighty hours to complete.

All the work took place at Kinetika’s new studio at High House Production Park in Thurrock, next door to Royal Opera House’s new costume and production workshops. The project involved a team of 20 local artists and volunteers – many of whom were trained by Kinetika as part of their outreach programme ‘Kinetika People’.

Want to have a go yourself? Kinetika will host hour-long Batik workshops on 5 September (11am–6pm) and 6 September (11am–4.30pm), free to everyone with a Deloitte festival day pass and are open to all ages. Find out more.

Deloitte Ignite runs 3–27 September 2015 and includes a wide range of free and ticketed events.

‘When we walked into the rehearsal, Wayne McGregor briefly said that he wanted us to capture the movement. For a few moments, everything was still, but when the music started, for almost 45 minutes straight, everything in front of us was moving!’, continues Olly.

The ballet draws on three of Woolf's best-loved novels – Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – as well as extracts of her autobiographical writings. The Instagrammers were invited to sit in on a studio run-through of Act II, which is inspired by Orlando.

‘Orlando is all about gender and identity, and the coming together and pulling apart in the dance seemed reminiscent of the splintering and coalescing of an identity’, says Instagrammer Dolly Brown (@londonlivingdoll). ‘Combined with the Elizabethan-inspired costumes we saw – designed by Moritz Junge – this piece is going to be quite something. I can't wait to see it in performance.’

The #ROHWoolf Instameet follows the first #emptyROH instameet last year, during which Instagrammers were invited to explore the ROH's backstage departments and watch The Royal Ballet preparing for a day of rehearsals during morning class.

From gem-encrusted leotards to authentic period corsets, the Royal Opera House Costume Department is responsible for creating, refurbishing and conserving thousands of opera and ballet costumes per season. A 160-strong team is spread across three floors of the Royal Opera House. There is no such thing as a quiet day and, with up to six hundred costumes per production, staying ahead of the game is vital.

The Dye Shop work three to six months in advance, covering eight productions at any one time. Their work includes dying, hand-painting and staining garments (even providing copious amounts of fake blood!). In addition, digital printing enables the team to reproduce historic fabrics no longer available – staging The Winter’s Talefor example requires digital printing some 300m of fabric for the Shepherdess costumes alone. The dye team work closely with the Costume Workroom, preparing and painting fabrics as the Workroom team cuts, tacks, sews and fits.

‘We always cut initial patterns out of calico – it’s inexpensive and versatile, and so the perfect fabric for us to check the design. We then start working with the proper fabric, fitting each costume to the performer’, says Catriona Paterson, Head of the Ladies Workroom. ‘There are only four full-time sewing assistants in our workroom, and so we focus on the Principals – which is a substantial undertaking in itself. Take Don Quixote – there were only three costumes for Kitri, but we had to do five lots of each for the different casts. Similarly, principal opera singers will only arrive two or three weeks before rehearsals, and costumes need to be ready for them from the very beginning of their time in the studio.’

For new productions, the department works with the designer right from the first stages.

‘It’s quite an intimate relationship with the designer as we work literally next to each other all the time’, says Costume Supervisor Ilaria Martello. ‘I have to understand and interpret their vision, and arrange what fabrics and processes are needed to achieve the design. At the stage rehearsals, there will be always be changes because of the lighting, distance, interaction and movement. My job doesn’t really finish until the first night!’

The costumes on the Royal Opera House stage not only have to fit the designer’s vision, but also need to be practical. For ballet, this means enabling free movement – something the Costume Department is all too aware of.

‘Ballet fabric needs to be light and stretchy, particularly over the shoulders, to allow for maximum movement’, continues Catriona, who is now in her 16th year at the Royal Opera House. ‘If the dancer is being lifted, how slippery is the fabric? The designer might have to be told that satin won’t work, or we might discreetly add net or rubber patches.’

A huge number of components can be required for any one costume – the much-loved tutu in particular. Each skirt will need elastic, ribbon, hooks and bars, tape and boning, wire and threads. Similarly, a skirt for La Sylphide requires about 100m of netting – seven layers, each with an average of nine panels that each measure up to a metre each. Having everything to hand at the right time is quite a task for the costume stockroom.

‘Everything has to be of the best quality so that it lasts a long time – nothing is disposable’, says Stockroom Assistant Eloise Smith. ‘Space dictates what is ordered and when, but we have to have everything to hand and so we only have small quantities of each item. It’s a moveable feast!’

Mal Barton, Head of Costume Workroom, is in charge of maintaining all of the costumes from existing Royal Ballet repertory – the oldest of which includes the costumes in Romeo and Juliet, which are from 1975.

‘There are about 500 costumes for Romeo and Juliet, and around seventy percent of them are original,’ explains Mal. ‘There is a lot of wear and tear – some will have been re-fitted 20 times – but they last a long time because of good maintenance and repair. It takes the entire revival workroom (about 18–20 people) some 1,500 hours to refurbish the costumes in the workrooms, a job we need to start working on at least six weeks before rehearsals start.’

For the 2015/16 Season, the Costume Department will be working on 12 new productions, and 27 revivals. With such a diverse and demanding workload, it’s no surprise that high quality costume-makers are high in demand, and the department encourages training for promising students. Last Season, the department offered 48 work experience placements and, from next Season, will be supporting a new degree course in Costume Construction.

The Costume Department's work is directly supported by the Sewing Appeal, which funds anything from stockroom supplies to work experience placements: £170 will pay for the training of one work experience student, while £150 will buy enough calico for eight prototype costumes and £50 will buy a pot of specialist fabric dye. 'Across both art forms, we produce more than 50 productions per Season, which means we look after 10,000 costumes a year', says Mal. 'When it comes to setting the scene and helping to tell the story of an opera or ballet, costumes are vital.'

100,000 opera and ballet fans. That number could fill the Covent Garden main stage auditorium more than 44 times over and is the current level of subscribers to the Royal Opera House YouTube channel (which increases by thousands each month). The channel is the most subscribed-to channel run by an arts organization in the world.

To celebrate this milestone, we wanted to revisit some of our favourite videos on the channel. They are of course just the tip of the iceberg – as of today we have 744 films on our channel! To explore our hundreds of behind the scenes clips, trailers and short films - not to mention being the first to see new films – subscribe to the channel.

Let us know which films you’ve most enjoyed on our YouTube channel. What would you like to see more of?

Ballet designers play a crucial role in the art form. Their work helps to communicate the subjects, themes and stories explored by choreographers – particularly in contemporary ballet, where sets, costumes and special effects are increasingly used to reinforce the expression of ideas through movement. Designer Jean-Marc Puissant works regularly at the Royal Opera House and has become known for his rich and award-winning partnership with The Royal Ballet’s Artistic Associate Christopher Wheeldon.

Puissant describes how, 'having been a dancer, I know the needs of dancers from the point of view of uncluttered set design and the use of fabrics'. The designs for his Royal Ballet debut on Wheeldon's Tryst perfectly demonstrate this aesthetic. Puissant's set is dominated by a large, grey screen against which are projected washes of colour. The dancers wear leotards of a similar smudgy grey, cut through with blurry stripes of purple, red and fiery orange. The designs accord with what Wheeldon describes as the work’s juxtaposition of ‘the beauty and the romance of nature and this incredible shifting landscape… with the idea of a very urban civilization’.

Wheeldon and Puissant’s next work was DGV: Danse à grande vitesse, which had its premiere in 2007 – a response to composer Michael Nyman's score, MGV: Musique à grande vitesse, written to commemorate the 1993 inauguration of France's TGV train. Wheeldon’s choreography for this ballet takes the audience on a journey through extended pas de deux and surging choreography for the corps de ballet, while Puissant’s set – which he describes as being ‘at the crossroads of something theatrical and something functional’ – is made up of huge sheets of contorted metal mesh that bring to mind the modern, technological world that produced the TGV.

The following year came Electric Counterpoint, winner of a Critics’ Circle Award. The ballet explores the identities and inner thoughts of four dancers. Against Puissant’s sleek, bare décor, which comprises white walls of differing heights and set at varying angles, the dancers perform Wheeldon’s striking choreography with a multitude of video projections of themselves, created by Michael Nunn and William Trevitt of BalletBoyz.

Puissant’s recent collaboration with Wheeldon, the 2013 ballet Aeternum, gave rise to his most impressive piece of stagecraft for the Company yet. Wheeldon set Benjamin Britten’s haunting Sinfonia da Requiem in an exploration of the pain and horror of loss. Puissant’s response is an imposing sculpture of wooden planks that looms at the back of the stage and, as the ballet progresses, rotates and expands into a towering, shattered structure before lifting into nothingness. The dancers wear beautiful, simple costumes in Puissant’s signature palette of greys with flashes of purple and orange that highlight Wheeldon’s powerful, tortured choreography. The ballet won the 2013 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and the 2014 Critics’ Circle Award.

In addition to his work with Wheeldon, Puissant created the set designs for The Royal Ballet’s first production of George Balanchine’s abstract three-act ballet Jewels. Puissant’s designs reference the styles that define the music and choreography in each act – French lyricism in ‘Emeralds’, brilliant American jazz in ‘Rubies’ and pure Russian classicism in ‘Diamonds’. The production also won an Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.

When we are in the audience for an opera we are aware of the artists on stage and in the pit, we are hopefully caught up in the drama of the performance and pulled in by the power of the music. What is invisible – unless something goes wrong – is the team working behind the scenes to put the production on stage; managing and driving what could be described as the ‘opera machine’.

Behind the scenes, stage crew, technicians and stage managers come together with the artists in an often pressurized, always carefully coordinated, way to enable the performances and deliver the spectacular theatrical effects.

This staff is usually unseen and often unsung, but we are tremendously proud of having some of the best teams you could possibly imagine. The artists know how important they are - and we now have a way to let you glimpse this part of our world.

Our new project, The Opera Machine, offers an extraordinary multi-angled view of all that is involved: a flaming helix, trap doors and a two-ton spinning wall all feature in this performance of Act III of Wagner’s Die Walküre. In one tense moment, the Stage Manager works with colleagues to fix a crucial flaming prop for bass baritone Bryn Terfel, who sings the role of Wotan, delivering it just seconds before Bryn takes to the stage.

Decide how you would like to experience the opera: jump between cameras at will, or watch the director’s cut (featuring footage from each of the 17 cameras) all the way through. It’s possible to listen to the music alone, hear it with the backstage radio or overlay with commentary from BBC Radio 3’s Suzy Klein. You can also dig deeper by following the prompt book, used by the Deputy Stage Manager, to get a sense of what it’s like to coordinate such a large team during a performance.

Or if you want to understand even more fully why we think Antonio Pappano is the best Music Director in the world, watch him conduct the whole act through a camera in the pit capturing his every gesture and expression.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Deloitte, who enabled us to film Die Walküre ahead of Deloitte Ignite 2013. We’re looking forward to seeing what The Royal Ballet have in store for Deloitte Ignite 2014 this September, which takes the theme of myth as a starting point.

Have fun with The Opera Machine – enjoy it for two minutes or play around with it for hours. I learnt several things that I didn’t know about how things work backstage watching this being filmed myself, so we think you will never be able to quite watch an opera performance again in the same way after visiting The Opera Machine.